What Could Have Been – Delilah/Oziah

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“His name was Faust Greyheart. I am going to tear your fucking heart out and make you watch as it stops beating.”

“Oh, I remember now. You’re talkin’ about that old tiefling, aren’t you? How did that one go…”

Langston turns to look at Tinuviel, a gleeful smile spreading across his handsome face.

“Was it something like this?”

He levels the crossbow at Tinuviel, but Oziah is too slow.

“Die for me.”

Just like last time, she can do nothing but scream with powerless rage as he fires off a spell. The beam of green light slams into Tinuviel’s towering, cloaked form and she doesn’t stand a chance. She tumbled to the floor in a flurry of silk, her magical robes now reduced to plain fabric – a funeral shroud for the woman underneath.

The world falls away. Limbo goes silent under the rushing of blood in her ears. Langston, Jack, the Lady of Pain – none of them matter. She pushes forward, throws herself down to where the bundle of constellation dusted fabric floats limply, clawing desperately at it to reveal the body underneath. She wasn’t fast enough last time but she learned her lesson.

Her fingers finally find an opening and she tears the cloak away, revealing Delilah’s masked face. Her dark eyes are open and empty, staring at nothing, devoid of life. Oziah forces herself to look away. She gathers Delilah in her arms and pulls away more fabric, revealing the other woman’s throat and part of her chest. Oziah’s hand trembles as she presses it to the bare skin over Delilah’s heart. She feels nothing.

Clenching her teeth against the dread threatening to consume her, she pulls out a small glass vial hanging from a leather cord around her neck. Diamonds are far too easy to lose without something to carry them in, even one worth 300 gold pieces.

She rips the cord loose from around her neck and without a moment’s hesitation, crushes it in her fist. Blood spurts from it, hot and crimson, and mixes with the shards of glass as she presses it all against Delilah’s soft skin. She presses hard, working the sharp pieces under both Delilah’s skin and her own, until she can be certain the diamond is where it needs to be.

She bends her head to place a kiss on Delilah’s forehead, holding her close in the crook of her arm and drawing on every ounce of arcane power she’s ever wielded.

“Come back to me.”

Air rushes into her lungs, cold, sharp and foreign. Her limbs scrabble for something to hold onto or kick off from as Delilah’s eyes snap open. It is pitch black, no light to be seen. It’s too dark to be anything but the end, too soft to be anywhere but not in her body. The Shadows have finally called to her for the last time. But pushing past all of these confusing physical sensations is a rushing anger, a fury that sees the beginning of a scream wanting to tear from her throat.

Just before the air in her lungs could give power to her voice, Delilah feels a strong, callused hand press down right above her heart, as if to check for a pulse. Oziah’s voice comes to her through the darkness, as familiar as the shadows that hide her from harm.

“We’re alive. We’re both alive. He’s dead.”

Her voice is shaky with apparent relief, her breathing quick but already slowing. She repeats the words over and over until reality settles in and memory comes flooding back, and Delilah realises what the darkness around them is.

“I… I…” Delilah’s hand finds Oziah’s on her bare chest and squeezes it. Taking a deep breath, the darkness around them shudders. As she exhales it bursts, the tendrils falling away from their forms on the downy bed, retreating to the corners as the low embers of the fire in the hearth across the room casts a deep, crimson glow.

“It was just a dream…” her voice rises a little in question.

Oziah drops her head onto Delilah’s shoulder, giving one last sigh.

“Yes. They’re both dead, and we are decidedly not,” she says with her usual animosity towards the world in general. If Delilah didn’t know better she could be forgiven for thinking Oziah was rather put out by the fact. She must have found the situation acceptable enough though, as she settles in and traces the unblemished skin under her palm with rough fingertips, seemingly ensuring herself that no shards of glass were trapped underneath.

“I wouldn’t have let him take you from me,” she murmurs.

A flush creeps across Delilah’s skin even as she raises herself up on one elbow. The mattress sinks under the change of pressure. She is not used to such plush softness.

“I wouldn’t leave you so easily…” Now that the dream has faded away and Delilah takes a proper look at the woman beside her, a thought crosses her mind. “Did you have the same dream as me? That what happened in Limbo didn’t – it was… something else?”

Oziah frowns at the question, narrows her eyes briefly at the realisation and then shrugs, as she apparently isn’t heavily invested in looking too closely at the mystery.

“Possibly,” she says, rubbing at Delilah’s smooth skin with her thumb before resolutely pushing her back down onto the impossibly soft mattress again. “That seems rather efficient of us. Instead of wasting time recounting our nightmares to each other, we can move straight on to the reassurance that it was just a dream.”

Her hand finally strays from where it was pressed, disappearing under the silk sheets. The pale woman underneath her let’s out a small gasp.

“Unless you’d rather draw up a diagram and explore the various arcane possibilities?” she asks, her face the very picture of innocence.

“Don’t give me that look,” Delilah scoffs, her right hand tracing a line up Oziah’s back. Dark eyes fall to full lips but they are not looking at what’s in front of them, as her frown returns. “Shared dreams… I’ve heard it’s possible, but not without some kind of conduit…”

Her gaze drifts, looking past the velvet drapes of the ridiculously large bed to the darkness beyond where the low red light does not touch. For a moment, Delilah thinks she feels something trying to reach for her, or is it trying to say something to her? If only she could-

Two strong hands grip Delilah’s wrists, lifting them up and over her head, to then hold them pressed against the mattress. Her attention is instantly caught by cobalt blue eyes as Oziah’s presence looms above, filling her entire vision.

“Wrong answer, my love.” Oziah leans in close, the blue of her eyes disappearing into shadow as her hand goes back underneath the sheets.

---

“So. I was wondering. Apart from the various people that we will one day wipe from the face of this sorry earth, what’s next? I know I’ll be doing the same as before; I’ll take underwhelming jobs with people whose company I seldom enjoy and more often loathe, and keep earning money. But you, my vicious steel dagger – what will you do now that the Fugitive and the Accomplice are no more?”

Delilah had been pondering the very same thing earlier that day.

“Take some time to think and plan,” she replies, gently brushing her fingers through Oziah’s rich chestnut coloured hair. “Maybe see if I can try to find my father.”

She didn’t know why she mentioned it, but now that she had there was no going back. Delilah wondered if there would be another round of a question for a question. Underneath her hand, Oziah stretches lazily like a large, docile cat, the muscles in her back rippling before she settles down against the sheets again, resting her head on Delilah’s stomach. She still looks sated and relaxed, but her eyes have taken on that familiar calculating look.

“And how do we feel about your father? Which list are we adding him to?”

“I’m not sure,” the Pale Daughter admits. It was strange hearing her voice so hesitant, so… young. “He has been absent most of my life, but was someone interesting enough to have caught my mother’s eye. She used to say my shadow abilities come from him.”

Oziah catches the free hand not tangled in her hair and twines their fingers together, pulling Delilah’s hand close to press a soft kiss to her knuckles.

“No matter where our abilities came from, they’re ours now, to do with as we please. But I agree, finding your father could be important. Better the devil you know.”

Delilah smiles before stealing a quick kiss from Oziah’s lips.

“Besides that – and getting increasingly more deadly so as to tear down our respective parental houses – I am also curious to see what the fallen Netherese city has hidden in it’s halls. I might try reaching out to the Delvers there, see how their quarrel with the Archanetherils is going over that lich we found a few moons ago.”

Oziah smiles, bestows Delilah’s hand with another kiss before reaching for her empty glass of wine on the bedside table, crawling to drape herself almost entirely on top of Delilah in the process.

“I suppose I could be convinced to accompany you on some of these trips. I can stand next to you and be beautiful and threatening. It’s a very useful skill.”

“One might say your only skills,” Delilah teases, stretching out as Little Beastie leaps up onto the bed, heading straight for her pillow. “I’ll allow it. Someone has to be the professional on the team, and you are, if nothing else, a professional through and through.”

Oziah leans in again, whispering against Delilah’s lips.

“Consummate.”

She steals another kiss before turning to glare at the cat settling in on the plush pillow.

“If you claw my sheets I’ll have your hide.”

The little creature yawns, stretching out their limbs, claws extending as if to test the conviction of that threat. A quick word spoken in Elvish from Delilah makes Little Beastie pause, their amber eyes glancing over to her before their little daggers retreat. They growl a meow and begin licking themselves with all the dignity a cat possesses.

Oziah gets to her feet, picking up a soft robe from the floor and putting it on. Delilah sighs in disappointment. Oziah stokes the fire with more wood and fetches another bottle of wine from a chest before crawling back into bed.

“I’m still waiting to hear back from Queen Miandra about my father and Leomar. I need to keep some sort of eye on what’s going on in Lesos.” She uncorks the bottle and refills both of their glasses, handing one back to Delilah. “Do you know anything about her? Will I have to wait long, do you think?”

Delilah swirls her glass a little before answering. “We only just stopped the Mad Modron and his lesser associate and poor excuse of a versemaker. But if there’s one thing I know about the Queen of Ken and Cunning is she honors her word.” She glances at Oziah, lips tilted up in a knowing smile. “You will hear from her soon.”

Oziah looks at her over the rim of her glass, eyes searching her face as she clearly turns something over in her mind. After a moment, Delilah sees her visibly set something aside, letting a question die on her lips and taking a sip of wine instead.

“One of my skills – apart from being beautiful and violent – is patience. I can wait.”

There’s a weight to her words, a double meaning. An unspoken reassurance and the choice to trust instead of interrogate. A voice in her mind screams in alarm and paranoia. It sounds a little like Jaezred. She ignores it.

Delilah reaches up, taking the glass from Oziah’s hand and setting it on the bedside table on her side. When she turns back she takes the other woman’s face in her hands, letting her lean, hard body press close.

“Oziah. Your patience is not something I want to test. You say you can wait but I… We have moved so fast into this. Into us.” Her fingers begin to push into Oziah’s silky hair as Delilah pulls herself to sit on top of her. Despite the intimacy of their bodies, it is clear the half-elf is trying to be honest, in as much as she can be. “You know I am more than just a woman who is very good with a knife. I am trained in infiltration, in subterfuge, spy craft, assassination and all manner of things done in the dark. But to you, my dark angel, I will only ever be one thing.”

She rests her forehead against Oziah’s, closing her eyes as Delilah’s hands fall down her back, over the scars where wings once probably shone bright as the sun, down to her waist to hold on tightly.

“Yours – in my heart and soul.”

Oziah lets out a single, trembling breath.

“Mine.”

Little Beastie quickly finds another place to rest.